Microsoft Open-Sources Classic Text Adventure Zork Trilogy (microsoft.com) 33
Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation.
The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system.
The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.
The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system.
The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.
The source is there? (Score:5, Funny)
I thought that the source got eaten by a Grue.
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Perhaps Zork's predecessor, Adventure ?
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The zork data was released by infocom decades ago.
The z-machine interpreter that used said zork data is the part only released in binary forms, no source.
That's why nearly no one really cared.
There are hundreds of thousands of z-machine interpreters out there.
A small handful still maintained and updated, and work with todays computers, operating systems, and UIs.
This is the source to the first couple original infocom z-machine interpreters.
Valuable for historic purposes only.
It's akin to saying my home.html
Re:The source is there? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the source to the first couple original infocom z-machine interpreters.
Valuable for historic purposes only.
False. The source code they linked to is the ZIL source code of the games themselves, as uploaded to GitHub (illegally at the time) by Jason Scott in 2019.
But this announcement totally ignores the fact that the source code of all of the other Infocom text adventures is there too, still illegally.
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The source code they linked to is the ZIL source code of the games themselves, as uploaded to GitHub (illegally at the time) by Jason Scott in 2019.
I at first thought that this article would set the record for being the oldest dupe on Slashdot, but the Zork source code now being available legally is indeed new information: The Source Code For All Infocom Text Adventure Classics Has Been Released [slashdot.org] from April 2019.
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They had to drop the source so the thief could open it
An AI recreated the source code ... (Score:3)
I thought that the source got eaten by a Grue.
An AI recreated the source code from a lengthy review by Jerry Pournelle in Byte Magazine. :-)
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Nah...it got stuck in Lisp Limbo and Microsoft cut it out...
Memories... (Score:4, Interesting)
A large part of the experience was as a frustrating guessing game. There's no interpretation at all, so you have to put the exact string it is expecting to accomplish a task or action. And if you have no idea what that is, it can take hours or days to figure it out. And a whole lot of it was completely un-obvious. Invariably you rely on someone else who had figured out how to get past a certain part. It was a group effort.
The themes and the writing were cool. The experience of actually playing through the game, not so much.
It would be interesting to fish through the code to see how it was put together.
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Indeed, I wrote me a front-end for Gemstone III on Compuserve to automate all that crap with key combos.
You never had a chance against the hundreds of other people who could actually TYPE.:-)
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I'm pretty sure that Gemstone III was on GEnie. I had been playing since the last month of GS2 beta... those GEIS computers were not very timeshare friendly, and the game would sometimes freeze up user commands while the monsters clicked away on their 10 second timers. As I recall, GS3 was set up on a Sun workstation to avoid such problems, and I guess it's possible that they could have added another gateway from Compuserve.
Thanks to how they did turn timing, I am to this day quite good at counting down se
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Annoying and overly literal puzzles are my generation's jam. And really any generation going at least as far back as those who read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or the Oz books.
I still haul Zork out once a decade and play at least the first one. I rarely have the energy to power through the second or third. I also occasionally pick up Return to Zork (1993) which is more of a full motion point-and-click game. A genre that really has no equivalent today and is perhaps more obsolete than a text adventure,
Appears to be a legal release only (Score:5, Informative)
This code was made available (if less than lawfully, nobody who matters complained) over ten years ago; I believe the conclusion of that story is here [textfiles.com].
West of House (Score:1)
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>
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Open mailbox
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>Open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.
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>Examine leaflet!
"WELCOME TO ZORK!
ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!"
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(love it! Great Job!)
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Get leaflet
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>Get leaflet
Taken.
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Read leaflet
Re:West of House (Score:4, Informative)
Open mailbox
Open mailbox" can refer to a physical mailbox or a digital email account.
It is illegal to open a mailbox that does not belong to you, even if the house appears abandoned. Mailboxes installed and used for delivery by the USPS are considered federal property, and tampering with them or the mail inside is a federal offense.
If you are not the property owner or an authorized representative, you cannot legally open the mailbox.
Do not force the lock: Prying, drilling, or breaking the lock is illegal and will likely damage the mailbox, making it unusable for future mail delivery.
Do not take anything from the property: Taking items from an abandoned house is considered theft.
AI responses may include mistakes. For legal advice, consult a professional.
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Hello, Sailor!
I'm a bit of an obsessive Infocom fan, including having run a multi-year RPG that, among other sources, uses all of the Infocom games as source material. And I don't know of anything in any of it that says that the postal services on Zork have the exact same rules and regs as the USPS, or that rule in particular. Admittedly, other materials in the games would probably lead one to believe that, if anything, the rules and regulations there are probably even MORE restrictive. But we have no proof
Good to see it released under a good licence, but (Score:2)
It's great to see the old Zorks released under a good license, but it's unfortunate that Jason Scott, an internet troll, is at all involved in the process. Best to completely avoid anything to do with that guy.
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ZILF? (Score:2)
Then violently penetrate, sexually.
Does this mean original binaries are also free? (Score:2)
Does this mean the original binaries are also free, or do we have to recompile them from this source code to legally use them?